Unlike generations before them who trudged to the campus library, college students these days can read a Shakespearean sonnet or an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel without ever cracking the spine of a book.

With a few computer keystrokes in their dorm room, they can tap into more volumes than a scholar could finish in a lifetime, a vast reservoir of literature, history and scholarly journals, all of it online.

It's fast and convenient -- so much so that they can do it in their pajamas.

But is something subtle being lost in this rush of the written word?

Even as academics applaud what the Internet and digitization have done for research and classroom learning, some also express concern that the technology has changed the way students read.

With search engines able to scan millions of print sources for a single passage, a generation with an already short attention span is being encouraged to behave like literary "hunters," snatching up nuggets for classroom credit without necessarily benefiting from the rhythm and the flow of the entire written work.

Often, say some professors, students are unable to distinguish between what's credible and what's bogus as information needed for an assignment piles onto their screens.

The very way online information is accessed -- by jumping from one Web site to the next -- does little to encourage linear thought as is used when reading a book.

"Students over the years, I think, are losing a sense of tone," said David Miller, chairman of the English department at Allegheny College. "When you read text, one of the most important things you need to intuit is the tone of the writer's voice and the continuousness of things."

"It has to do with nuances," he said. "It's like the difference between an analogue recording and a CD."

Such concerns are heard most often across the humanities, where professors in book-centric disciplines must convince young adults raised on Google that wandering the library stacks, and looking beyond the first plausible answer to a question, are key elements of learning.

"In the hard sciences, what really matters is what's published today, the latest information is the cutting edge of knowledge," said Mary Jane Petrowski, associate director with the Chicago-based Association of College and Research Libraries.

"But what people in humanities are doing is creating new interpretations of texts that can be 500 years old. Nothing ever goes out of style," she said.

Academics in those fields talk about "serendipitous moments" when the book on the shelf next to the ones being sought proves to be the most fascinating, the most transformative. To those faculty, what gets lost in the digitization of knowledge are the feel of the leather and the smell of the paper.

"It's the whiff of history," Ms. Petrowski said.

To be sure, these are not the trepidations of some campus band of Luddites. After all, a history professor is as apt to rely on Google Scholar as colleagues in engineering or biology.

Even as he discussed the pitfalls, Dr. Miller marveled at what's available free and by subscription on myriad sites including JSTOR, a vast collection of scholarly journals, and ARTstor, a digital library with half a million images in art, architecture, humanities and social sciences.

"It's mind-boggling," he said.

Tricia George, 22, a University of Pittsburgh junior from Millvale majoring in urban studies, agrees that a writer's tone often is lost when a book is read digitally. But she said e-mail and other electronic communication actually encourage users to express themselves as writers more precisely.

And resources found inadvertently on Web sites are their own kind of serendipity. "It happens a lot faster than it would in a library," she said. "Click-click. 'Oh my gosh. There it is.' Click-click. 'Hey, I've just requested a 50-page book of educational materials and a DVD.' "

Some faculty simply want to be sure the value of the library isn't overlooked.

At Pitt, when David Bartholomae asks freshmen to explore scholarly writing related to a Charles Dickens novel, he's apt to tack on an extra requirement -- one meant to ensure they actually go to the library stacks.

"I ask them to bring me back a Xerox of the opening page of the journal article," said Dr. Bartholomae, chairman of the English department.

Faculty on many campuses tell students to go easy on use of Wikipedia and to balance online sources with print ones.

In crafting assignments, they require students to interpret and challenge online data they find "so they're learning something beyond what they're cutting and a pasting," said Joseph Kush, who directs the doctoral program in instructional technology within Duquesne University's School of Education.

Students need to be discerning in their use of data from the Web, said Susan Ambrose, associate provost for education at Carnegie Mellon University and a history professor.

But that's no small order, even on a tech-savvy campus such as hers.

"I teach Mexican immigration," she said. "A student will say 'This many Mexicans were arrested for drug dealing. This many came across the border and had babies.' I'll ask 'Where are you getting that?' And it will be from some neo-Nazi Web site."

Even with such shortcomings, it's hard to deny the quantum leap that has occurred as schools large and small have joined a global knowledge network, swapping data and research online.

A decade ago, Pitt's library system entered into one such online document-sharing agreement with libraries across East Asia, opening up scholarly publications once unavailable to researchers in the West, said Rush Miller, director of Pitt's library system.

Smaller libraries have benefited, too.

These days, librarians on the 1,500-student campus of Mount Aloysius College in Cresson, Cambria County, can offer patrons a far wider selection of scholarly and academic publications, said Robert Stere, acting library director. One reason: The inventory of periodical titles swelled from about 300 to 12,000 after electronic subscription services were added in the mid-1990s.

That's precisely the point, say those involved in digitizing books. A collection worthy of Harvard is no less important to someone in Barrow, Alaska, or Devils Lake, N.D . Whether it's on paper isn't the point.

"You're providing access to a library larger than those at Ivy League institutions to people who can't afford to go to those institutions," said Gabrielle Michalek, a Carnegie Mellon employee involved in the Million Book Project, an international digitizing effort spearheaded at the university. "I can only see an upside."

And there are the space savings and reductions in vandalism.

"Libraries used to have a horrible problem with people taking razors to journals," said Pitt's Dr. Miller. "We were constantly out trying to find duplicates."

Once a journal is available in digital form, he said, "That problem's gone."

For a student who might never get to Paris to see Leonardo Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa," a digital photo downloaded from the Web is a pretty good substitute. The Internet can give a student half a world away a realistic glimpse of the U.S. Constitution or the handwriting from Anne Frank's Diary.

Still, just as photos do not fully capture the texture of an original, students skipping from data source to data source may be losing some ability as readers to discern nuance, some professors say.

Allegheny's Dr. Miller recalled an introductory class discussion he led this fall on Ezra Pound's poem, "In a Station of the Metro," and how many students were quick to conclude the author's use of the word "apparition" meant ghostly, rather than an alternative meaning such as an unexpected sight. Dr. Miller wonders if that would have happened a generation ago.

"When I first started in the classroom, it was not uncommon to teach Dickens and you would read a Dickens novel every week," he said. "That's unheard of now. They simply don't read.

"Some of them are excellent readers -- faster than me. That's not the issue," he said. "It's the capacity to pay attention and sustain that attention."

At Penn State University, literature professor Michael Berube said jokingly that thanks to the Internet, he's had no reason to leave his desk since 2002.

Reading a novel on a monitor can be unpleasant, and in fact, Dr. Berube said he knows no colleagues who do. But he's not sure people are any less likely to read.

"The same culture that's given us Google has given us the 800-page Harry Potter novel," he said.

"I try not to be too dour about this," he said. "I have a friend who was an early enthusiast of the Internet, and by that I mean, 1993. I would tell him 'Yeah, fine. Wake me up when you can find specific passages in books I can't even remember.' "

Fifteen years later, said Dr. Berube, "we're there."